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Tim Spaulding, LibraryThing
November 19, 2008 03:14 PM | General, MLA2008Jonya Pacey, Help Desk Manager
I enjoyed the Wednesday luncheon speaker, Tim Spaulding, LibraryThing.com founder who calls his site a 'social network of some fairly intelligent people." He discussed not just the adding of records into the 'shared mental universe' of LibraryThing, which is all it is, being a metadata database about books, not the books themselves. But also he spoke of the tagging, of the weighted results lists you can pull up, of the Legacy Libraries ("I see dead people's books") and how you can compare your own library to other people's and discover shared interests and common bonds. He shared some of the more interesting tags and how they can be TagMashed to narrow down your results, something it is not easy to do using LoC subject headings. And I found it interesting that he had a great passion for his product and what it had added to the world. He said of tagging "These are real. Tagging tells us what a book means to people and how they see the world." Tagging and reviews are usually written by people who have completed the book and are moved to say something. However, this augments subject headings, it does not replace them. In this room of librarians, he was careful to point this out.
I have a LibraryThing account but did not realize how much I have missed, how much more I could be doing with it. I want to try it out, figure out what would be useful for me and others and teach other people how to use it. So before I go into the Vendor's area for refreshments, I wanted to post this. I will confess I cannot figure out yet how to see the Legacy Library list, of people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Marilyn Monroe's private libraries, but I will.
